Among the many reasons to give thanks for the existence of Dr David Starkey was his response to getting a CBE in last summer's Birthday Honours.

The list is always a complete dog's dinner, a mixture of Buggin's turn and queasy populism, and one probably needs to see the "thank you but no thank you" notes to make sense of it: if it was so long ago since Sir Sean Connery was knighted that the James Bond series needed another pat on the head to keep them filming in Britain, Daniel Craig might have seemed a more obvious choice than Barbara Broccoli, daughter of the legendary Cubby and now co-producer of the films.

The fact that Charles Saumarez Smith gets his CBE, on leaving the directorship of the National Gallery and taking over at the Royal Academy, probably just confirms the repeated rumour that Neil MacGregor, former director of the National, now brilliantly heading the British Museum, has politely declined honours not once but many times.

There are usually a few names one could imagine the Queen genuinely being delighted to see pop up, such as the magnificent Leslie Phillips who surely deserves the knighthood he has always looked as if he already owns, but only gets a CBE: one could easily imagine them settling down for a gin and vermouth and a gossip.

Most of those gonged today will already be preparing responses of Oscar-worthy tearful cringe. "This honour is shared with all those wonderful people I have worked with," they will insist, or "this is really an honour for my school/golf club/chat show/zebra crossing, not for me".

Not Dr Starkey, who accepted his with typically nifty timing. Her Majesty might just have brooded over the list of nominations for a little longer, if it had come in the wake of his recently breathtakingly frank views on her education, general knowledge and intelligence.

But by last June he had done no more than mutter that some of her forebears deserved everything they got, and so he joined the list of the great, the good, the deserving and the frankly baffling.

Did he blush and murmur that he didn't deserve it? Did he heck.

He said: "I feel absolutely childishly smug. Everybody affects to be completely unenthused, but I freely admit to feeling that glow one experienced at the earliest school prize, or that first star at primary school."

They'd never be so brutally honest - but that's just what most of those on the list will be thinking today.